Domain registrar AlpNames is popular for its domain discount special promotions. In doing so, some believe that spammers end up abusing these promotional discounts, registering domains en masse.
A domain investor shared their issue with AlpNames when he attempted to add them on Facebook: they were blocked.
I register and buy names for one sole purpose; development. Two years back I registered few names to develop a news portal. I completed all the legal and other procedures in my country and took license as well. After a few days, I found that my websites are banned by Facebook (banned sharing). I tried to figure out what happened, messaged fb support, changed host, transferred the name to another registrar and waited for months but got no success. So I gave up those beautiful names.
Again, I registered a decent name sharedhani/com (means Shareholder) to develop a stockmarket based web app. I and my friend had planned for the project and did our research for weeks. Yesterday when we were discussing it on messenger, I sent the URL and got to know that the name too was banned by fb. I checked other few names which I was working on developing and more than 5 were banned.
Upon investigating for an hour what I found was all the names that were banned are/were registered at Alpnames.
The domains include:
– Previously registered domains
– First time registered domains
– Previously developed domains
No any problems with domains at other registrars. And the interesting thing is their main domain AlpNames.com is also banned from facebook share. I will contact FB through a business account and see if anything positive comes.
The issue was responded to by AlpNames, that denied being the sole target of new policies at Facebook. They also mentioned that these new policies are far from clear:
We would like to inform you that we have been aware of this issue for some time, and that we have attempted to contact Facebook about it, but the only (very brief) reply that we have received merely makes reference to a new policy update.
[…]
On testing this further and doing some digging ourselves, we found that the majority of domains tested that are registered with us link absolutely fine from Facebook, while a handful of domains did not – this was across numerous TLDs. We also found that many domains registered with other registrars also experience this problem. Thus far, we have come to the conclusion that certain strings may be blocked, but we do not know the reasons for it, or the algorithms that Facebook uses.
There have been no recent updates in that exchange over at NamePros, so we’ll assume that the Facebook issue still persists.
